This is an extract from the Wordsworth poem: Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798
... For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.—And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
...
How does this speak to you? Is it what you know? Deep down? In your core? Is it what drives you? Does it ground you? Does it say why you do what you do? Why you think what you think? Why you are who you are? Why you try to live as you do?
Wordsworth wrote this when England was in a messy transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy with enormous technological development and social disruption. The world was changing and people were being changed along with it. In such times, we all need an anchor.
Respond